The retail merchandiser, drugstore and supermarket industries have placed an impetus on reducing labor costs. Additionally they have expended energy in a variety of different ways to reduce or eliminate the amount of time required to process items to be purchased by a customer. To this end, there have been a number of self-service checkout system concepts developed which attempt to substantially eliminate the need for a checkout clerk. A self-service checkout system permits a customer to process and pay for their purchase with little or no retailer personnel assistance. Self-service has benefited consumers and retailers alike. Such systems have been widely adapted for purchasing gasoline at self-service service stations and are now becoming more available in retail stores. Self checkout models have a variety of features and benefits designed to make the self checkout process fast and easy. A variety of scanning and bagging (scan and item and place immediately in a bagging area) and scan and pass (scan an item and place it on a belt which transports the item to a bagging area) have been introduced into the retail checkout market.
Commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,676,343 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,018, hereby incorporated by this reference thereto, disclose systems for the automated checkout of articles selected by a customer for purchase in supermarkets and like facilities. The former patent involves an arrangement addressing articles which bear a so-called “universal product code” (UPC), typically in the form of a bar code uniquely indicative of the identity of the article bearing the code. The UPC of each article selected for purchase is scanned or read and a signal indicative of the article identity is generated and applied to a central processing unit (CPU) which has stored in associated memory storage for the UPCs of all articles available for purchase which are so encoded, correlated with the price and other characteristics of the articles, such as weight. Articles are placed on a conveyor following UPC scanning and thereby led into a “security tunnel”, which is guarded against customer fraud by various light curtains, which are in the form of light sources and associated photocells. In the course of article conveyance, its weight is physically measured and a signal is generated indicative of the measurement.
Comparison is made of the stored, weight-indicative signal and the physical measured signal. If the comparison is negative, indicative of potential customer fraud, article processing is interrupted and various courses of action are obtainable, one being the reverse movement of the conveyor. Otherwise, in the course of continuing positive comparison results, the customer's order is carried forward, with price totalization effected from stored price-indicative signals.
In the latter patent, items are transported “down stream” from the scanning and payment area through the “security zone” and into a collection area. An additional item transport method is to have the belt positioned “up stream” from the scanning and payment area and place item directly into a secure collection area. Current “up stream” item transport methods require the self service operator to manually press a button to move items into position for scanning.
Current self-checkout systems require that customers scan, pay and bag orders by pulling items directly from a cart or basket and processing them for purchase. Moreover, while attendant only checkout areas include a conveyor at the front of the processing unit to make it easier to unload and stage orders for processing, these systems only allow the transportation of the staged items for processing via depressing of a manual button. This creates inefficiencies since the customer (in the case of a self-checkout system) or an attendant must engage the belt manually.
Placing an input conveyor belt at the front of self checkout station provides easier unloading and processing of items. However, current input belt self checkout systems have an item handling limitation: the input belt is operator controlled. Because such belts do not automatically move items as they are unloaded and scanned, they require manual intervention to position items close enough to the operator to reach them for scanning.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide item transport system and method with a belt positioned “up stream” from the scanning and payment area that automatically moves items into position for scanning and tendering.